This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Monday, July 07, 2008

What happens when we assume there is no design in life?

Friends remind me of an excerpt from a debate between intelligent design advocate Phillip Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, and Darwinist philosopher William Provine, in which Provine proclaims,

First, the argument from design failed. There is no intelligent design in the natural world. When mammals die, they are really and truly dead. No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly. (Stanford University, April 30, 1994)

Provine has said this elsewhere over the years, most notably in the Expelled movie.

A friend comments that he admires Provine for at least being honest about where materialist atheism leads - as opposed to Richard Dawkins, who moralizes with abandon, without recognizing that his belief system cannot privilege one morality over another by definition.

What happens then? Well, what happens then is being played out in Canada right now, and all across Europe. All ethical systems come under attack, and degenerate into a swamp of unfocused feelings. In Canada, a quasi-judicial body known as a "human rights commission" - with far more power over individual Canadians' lives than any court would ever have - is alike empowered to pass judgment on a clergyman's pastoral advice and a late-night comic's jokes - based on assorted individuals' feelings of hurt or offense. One astonishing decision follows another, and you can read about many of them on a regular basis at civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant's blog.

Straw in the wind: When Levant recently tried debating an establishment lawyer, the establishment lawyer began to claim that Levant "needs counselling" - there are few more ominous words in a rapidly degenerating materialist society. The establishment neither has nor needs arguments for its position; it only needs to flow in whatever direction it is driven by the moods of the moment, and those whose moods (not "ideas", notice) are out of synch - "need counselling."

As Mario Beauregard and I put it in the The Spiritual Brain, the root of this sort of abuse is materialist atheism, in which

“science-based, effective and progressive policies” are not offered by a self to other selves, but driven by an object at other objects.” (p. 117)

That, I think, is what breeds the totalitarian impulse. The materialist has first dehumanized himself, then he dehumanizes others.